Is a One-Way English Immersion Teaching Approach Equitable to Those Chinese Non-English Major Students from Rural Areas?

Abstract

English is a compulsory course for students in China from primary education to postgraduate education. Recently more and more policymakers at Chinese universities have been forcing English education to be performed using a one-way English immersion approach. In their views, the more English practices in English classes, the better the learners’ learning performance will be. This study adopts a hermeneutics research method, a questionnaire survey and some interviews to investigate the question whether a one-way English immersion teaching approach is equitable to those from rural areas. It finds that this teaching approach is inequitable to those from rural areas in at least three aspects, including increasing their economic burdens, decreasing their English acquisition confidences, and mismatching with their career requirements. The study calls for Chinese policymakers to alter their urban-centered viewpoints toward English education, and English teachers to enrich the English teaching approaches in the future and pay more attention to the future career requirements of those from rural areas.